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Spice Up Your Meetings

Company meetings are a part of our professional lives that we sometimes wish we could do without. Let’s face it, no one likes being required to sit for an hour while their boss covers what they need to be doing or presents boring statistics. They are however, a necessity. Employees need to know the current and potential status of the company. There are ways to take that meeting from being the same old boring hour into one of the most efficient and engaging days of your week.

Start It Off Right

One of the easiest things you can do to liven up your weekly meetings is actually something we do here at Reaching neighbors. While this may not work for a large company, this idea can also be applied to smaller group meetings such as department meetings. To start off the meeting, everyone takes a second to share one good thing happening in their personal life and one good thing happening professionally. Inviting people to share something personally helps to not only to kick off the meeting, but it also brings everyone closer by knowing what things are going on with each other outside of the office walls. Most of the time, we don’t take the time to recognize or appreciate the good things going on around us because we are so occupied with the stress in our lives. Opening up the meeting this way helps to get people thinking about what is going right in their lives, as opposed to the things they need to do or didn’t get done. This is the same for what they decide to share professionally. Taking the time to recognize what everyone has already accomplished and completed helps to positively transition into the topic for that meeting.

Change of Scenery

Another trick to help keep everyone engaged and interested during these meetings to change the location every now and then. It can become a bit monotonous meeting in the same office during the same time every week. Shake things up a little bit by choosing different locations to hold a meeting. For example, spring brings in nice weather, so why not hold a meeting at an outside location? Doing this breaks up the monotony and can help to provide a more fun and relaxed tone for the meeting. It doesn’t have to be outside all the time either. Try meeting at a coffee house or even having a company lunch at a restaurant with Wi-Fi where you can still go over importance topics, but doing so in a new environment. Have employees submit potential meeting places and filter through the ones that can provide a creative environment while still enabling productivity.

Don’t Make It A Meeting

I know, it sounds crazy right? The whole point to enhance a meeting, not get rid of it completely. While organizing a structured amount of time to go over specific details may seem productive, there are ways to remain productive without the rigidness of a detailed meeting. Instead of allotting a two hour window to go over specifics, make it a day long affair by having a co-working session for everyone. Have everyone bring their materials into your largest conference room and work for the day from that space. Having everyone working together in the same room enables people to ask questions as they come up, rather than write them down and wait a week until the next meeting to mention it. People are able to more easily collaborate with each other and feed off of the work being done by others around them. Organizing a meeting this way gets rid of the formality and need for an itinerary, which can lead to more efficient problem solving and work completion.

However you choose to structure your meetings, just do so in a way that promotes participation and creativity. Make these meetings something employees look forward to, not something they dread.